By Any Name

by Cynthia Voigt

  THE WEDDING

  Perhaps it would be true to say that as long as he lived, it was Grandfather who was Mumma’s great enemy, and it was only after his death that Jonquil Cartenbury came to occupy that position, although it could also be truly said that it was only Jonquil Cartenbury with whom Mumma maintained a lifelong competition. Toward Grandfather she felt only distaste, disaffection, and a deep dislike, all of which he reciprocated. In the black-and-white photographs of the family at Aunt Anne’s wedding, however, the visible emotion Grandfather displays is his unassailable pride. Grandfather was photogenic, tall, trim, and elegantly white-haired, his features strong, his morning coat perfectly fitted, his expression one of implacable dignity. Grandmother had equally strong bones, although hers were cast in a finer mold; also, she had carriage, a straight back and shoulders, her chin high, her hats modest. Grandmother was queenly. Beside them, Massimo Ruscelli is clearly from another world, although clearly he is an equal.

  Clearly, at least, to any onlooker. It was never clear to Grandfather, and Grandmother was only dimly aware of how well their daughter had done, marrying Giancarlo, not only because of his cultural background and his own business successes but also because of his ability to endure and ignore, as if they did not matter, Howland assumptions of his inferiority. This for a man whose ancestors had been minor princes, and warriors too, long before either the Howlands or the Spencers had established their status by being among the first to set rough-shod feet on a wild new land. There were distinguished bastards in Giancarlo’s family tree, and in the photographs Signor Ruscelli has the look of a man with that kind of ancestry—alert, confident, and a little dangerous. Standing beside him, Giancarlo looks like his father.

  No wonder Mumma took to Giancarlo, and to his father as well. Between their good looks and goodwill and the combined rudenesses of the Howlands, there could be no contest for Mumma’s partisanship. She didn’t blame Pops. (“Your father is a wonderful man,” she used to tell us, “but his head is in the clouds. It’s not that he lacks the courage, he just doesn’t notice. Once I tell him, he’s always ready to do the right thing.”) At the ceremony itself, being an usher, Pops couldn’t do the right thing alongside his wife, although he undoubtedly would have been told to and probably would have agreed. When Mumma arrived in the church, one daughter in her arms and the other at her side, she took the usher’s crooked elbow and answered his traditional question with the word “Groom.” Being a Spencer cousin, or a Howland cousin, the usher was surprised, but he was also a gentleman, and he did what the lady asked. Mumma and Meg and Jo were taken to join the scattering of people sitting in the left-hand pews of Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Wampanoag, employees and employers of Giancarlo’s, a few friends, some of them with wives. She declined Capo Max’s hopeful invitation to sit beside him (“The front row at a wedding is for the immediate family of the bridal couple, you girls remember that”) and had herself seated directly behind him (“So he would know he wasn’t alone”).

  Jonquil Cartenbury was sent over to correct the error in urgent whispers. “I know,” Mumma said. “So come back over with me,” Jonquil Cartenbury concluded.

  “I don’t think so,” Mumma said.

  “But everybody—”

  “You can explain. Explain however you like.”

  “But, Rida, you’re supposed to—”

  “I don’t know that I want to sit down with the family of the bride,” Mumma said.

  Jonquil Cartenbury hovered, the organ playing behind her, more guests arriving and being seated; eventually she retreated to the crowded right-hand side of the church. Nobody commented on Mumma’s solipsism except Grandmother, who came up to her at the reception, gathered Jo into her own arms, and remarked, “I am not taking that personally.”

  “You’re not one who should,” Mumma assured her.

  “Yes, well. A woman doesn’t apologize for her husband,” Grandmother told her, and hesitated a second before adding, “Or for her daughter-in-law.”

  (“Your grandmother thought—no, she believed, it was like a faith for her, she believed it the way some people believe in God or science. She believed that it was the rules that made her life so easy. She thought life was about the rules people make for it, as if life was some kind of a board game and if you had a little luck, and you kept to the rules, you’d end up winning. Or maybe she thought it was like a game of solitaire and once the cards had been shuffled and laid out, if you had a good draw you were safe, as if it was arranged for you to win. Or to lose, although Grandmother considered herself someone who had won, since all she had to do once she was born was follow the rules. But really, life’s like a game of bridge: You’re dealt a hand and it can be a winning hand or a losing one, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll win or lose because there are other people at the table, your partner for one, and the other team for another, that’s three people—” “I can count, Mumma.” “—playing too, and people make mistakes, multiply that times three and even with a bad hand you can win. Or you can fool people, multiply that times three too, or you can just be smarter than they are. And luckier too, because anybody who sits down to play bridge or life without figuring out how much luck is involved is making a Big Mistake. I don’t want you girls doing that.”)

  MARRIED LIFE

  The wedding behind them, the bridal couple sailed to Italy in the company of Signor Ruscelli and remained there for an extended honeymoon, returning early the following fall to a landscaping business in arrears, with a son of inexact age.

  Grandfather was pleased with the boy; at least, he was pleased with his gender. At one of the long family dinners surrounding the holidays, he tackled Pops. “Even that greaser”—with a glance to see where Mumma was—“husband of your sister’s can get a son. When are you going to give me one to carry on our name? A Howland grandson: Is it too much to ask of you?”

  “You’ve got Ethan, too,” Pops answered, but Grandfather said, “The boy’s not going to settle down for years, and why should he? It’s up to Rida, but she seems determined to produce only girls.”

  “Actually,” Pops told him, “it’s the man who determines the gender of the child. That is to say, it’s the sperm. Scientific fact, Father.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Grandfather said, and then having thought about this point, “What’s wrong with you, then?”

  Amy was born a year later, and then there was me, and at every birth Mumma had to listen to Grandfather comparing his son’s masculinity to that of his sons-in-law. By then, however, Mumma had settled her family out on the Cape, and Pops had settled in contentedly at Brown, because, as Mumma pointed out, at Brown they knew his worth, they were pleased to have him as a doctoral candidate in their classics department, and they made it easy for him to work there. Living on the Cape, they went into Boston only for Mumma’s weekly business meetings, for the inevitable family occasions, or if Mumma’s real estate investments needed some direct interventions, since by the time I was three she owned and had renovated and rented out under separate managers six apartment buildings in North Cambridge. During those years, Mumma’s business interests had to share her entrepreneurial attentions with the enterprise of her children, first the three, then the four girls, whom it was her job to raise and mold and advise and ultimately present to the world.

  When Grandfather died—relatively young, in his early sixties, of cirrhosis—Mumma didn’t want to go to the funeral, but Grandmother said she needed her there. The death somehow took Grandmother by surprise and, moreover, she felt the loss deeply. During the weeks that followed the funeral, Mumma often sat for hours in the living room of the Louisburg Square house while I slept on her lap, or on Grandmother’s. It was not until a year and a half later that Grandmother finally emerged to reenter society. She had loved her husband. (“Of course she did, she had to, he was her husband. A woman can’t despise her husband until they’re divorced. Unless of course she’s European; they do things differently over there.”)r />
  PART TWO:

  Lucky To Have Me

  PROLOGUE:

  A Life

  There followed the whole rest of my mother’s life, years crammed with activities and commitments, weeks busy with conversations (some) and monologues (many), day after day balancing her maternal, business, and civic duties, being always herself. She was always herself, Rida Howland. Because all four of us bore witness to those years, we possess a plethora of facts, most of them presented through four separate and perhaps equal points of view. Thus, there is an overabundance of information, and that is the first of the three great obstacles to understanding our mother.

  The second is the woman herself. What was she thinking? What guided her in the things she chose to tell us and what she required of us, what advice she gave and which opinions she aired? Did she even have a plan? We seem unable to determine this, although I see to it that we keep on trying.

  And that is the third obstacle: Me. My obstinacy. I insist on continuing to try to understand our mother, apparently convinced, first, that this can be done and second, that I can do it. I am after all a scholar, as well as a long-time observer of the woman. I possess both direct information—she said that, she did this—and inferred—that is, all the material I have gleaned by observing the women my sisters have become, guided and shaped as they were by the experience of our mother. I listen to what they say. That each of them has reached a different conclusion doesn’t surprise me.

  “She was a realist,” Amy announces.

  “And a perfectionist,” is Meg’s opinion. “About everything, and all of us, too.”

  “Can a person be both a perfectionist and a realist?” I ask.

  “A genuine humanist, too. I mean, as she got older,” Jo remarks. “Didn’t you think?”

  “A humanist-realist-perfectionist? Is that possible?” I wonder at them.

  “How about laying off the Socratic method for five minutes?” one of them will request, and another will comment, “What else can you expect from a college professor,” pronouncing the last two words if not with an actual sneer then certainly stripped of the respect usually accorded us.

  “Pops was never like that,” the third will say.

  “He had Mumma,” I point out.

  “She wouldn’t have stood for it,” we agree.

  We mimic her voice: “I was ahead of my times,” and laugh.

  If the early part of Mumma’s life seems to have a narrative structure (one hurdle after another, o’erleapt), I suspect that this is only because they are the stories Mumma told about herself. She presented herself as she intended to be seen, perhaps made simple for our more simple minds, although it is equally possible that this is the person she believed she was. If she were telling the story of these subsequent years herself, would they also have clear dramatic shape and didactic purpose, as well as the same redoubtable heroine? Probably, but the only way I can present them is as a thematic narrative, involving swerves, not vaultings, growth, not change. Although, as far as I can see from observation of any woman’s adult years, from the four women’s lives I’ve observed most closely, this is entirely common.

  Except, of course, that I’m talking about Mumma. Thus, while the topics are common, because it is Mumma who lived them they assume capital letters: Motherhood, Wifehood, Friendship, Age, and then, inevitably, sadly…But not Death, really, so much as Absence. (Although in the case of my mother, this last is proving to be something of a vale atque ave, she having left behind what I can only think of as Aftermath, in the person of her youngest grandchild, Sarah, who is also and not incidentally—there being nothing incidental about Sarah—my own daughter.)

  If we tend to mother the way we enjoyed being mothered, as I believe we do, and also the way we would have liked to have been mothered, that is to say by reflection and reaction, then I persist in the hope that by examining Mumma from all of the angles available to me I will learn. Not learn how to be a good mother to Sarah, who abandoned me on the sidewalk in front of the school building on the first day of kindergarten (“I don’t need a mother anymore”), but rather, to understand her, to know when to stand at her shoulder, when to sit in the stands and cheer her on, when to place myself squarely behind her, and when to throw myself in front of her onrushing train. Or even, maybe, when to come after her balloon with a hatpin. How to help her see that she is loved and to know, about herself, that her love is welcomed.

  5.

  Mumma and Her Daughters

  HER DAUGHTERS AND MUMMA

  It wasn’t easy being Mumma’s daughters; that was one thing we could all agree on when I was finally old enough for my sisters to treat me like a fully enfranchised human being. That age was ten, if I remember correctly, although it should be noted that among us four sisters, remembering correctly has always been a sore point and a hotly debated issue.

  Since I was four years younger than Amy, then if I were ten Amy would have been fourteen, and she was two years younger than sixteen-year-old Jo, who was two years younger than Meg. Meg would have been starting college in the fall, so it must have been during the summer that I achieved my new, and proper, status.

  It would have to have been summer also because we sat at the breakfast table, just the four of us, and we were eating bowls of cornflakes. During the school year such a thing could never have happened, the four of us alone at the breakfast table eating cold cereal. During the school year, Mumma’s family always had a hot breakfast—eggs and toast, or pancakes with real maple syrup, oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar—always together, five days a week at 7 a.m., weekend mornings at 8, no matter what time you got to bed the night before. Dinner was another meal at which attendance was mandatory, but that was true year-round. There was no summer vacation from Mumma’s dinner table and only rarely a day off. Friends, if any lingered until dinnertime, were asked to sit down with us, boyfriends, girlfriends, anybody to whom Mumma could show off her cooking. All of her life, once she got started, Mumma cooked eagerly and ambitiously, and also well. When Julia Child introduced American TV audiences to the arts of classic French cooking, Mumma took it as a personal vindication. (“You girls can laugh, but I was one of the first to eat from other countries. I was always ahead of my times.”)

  That Cape Cod summer morning when we sat alone together at the breakfast table, I had just finished reading Little Women and announced my stunning discovery: “We’re named the same as them. Do you think she did it on purpose?”

  “What do you think, stupid?” Amy answered.

  “Because if she did, I should be the one named Amy,” I continued.

  “Maybe she hoped we’d turn out like them,” Jo said. “She probably wanted to be a mother like Marmee. She never had her own family, remember.”

  Amy decided, “They were Boston names. You know? Probably that’s why she named you Meg, Meg, being the first, and then, you know how she is, once she makes up her mind she doesn’t change it, she just keeps going.”

  “So I should be Amy,” I repeated.

  My sisters all looked at me with the same expression of impatient tolerance. They all had Mumma’s thick curly hair and Pops’ fine facial bones, as well as his blue eyes, although in Amy’s case the blue was more gray, sometimes green, her eyes more of a light hazel than real blue, and in Jo’s it was watery and pale. Meg and Jo were short, like Mumma, but Amy was tall, like me the tallest in her class, girl or boy. I had the misfortune to have gotten Pops’ lank, colorless hair plus Mumma’s thick eyebrows and determined chin. I’d also inherited my father’s poor vision and so, like him, had to wear glasses for everything except close work. I was pretty much a disaster, genetically speaking; everyone agreed about that. They also—except for Pops—agreed that I was a disaster in all other respects as well. Stubborn, too. According to Mumma, stubbornness was my greatest fault.

  But at ten I knew I was smarter than my sisters, and not just because Mumma told me I’d inherited my father’s brains (“And don’t let that go to your head, yo
ung lady”), so I made it simple for them. “Amy should be Beth, the second youngest, and I should be the youngest, Amy, if we’re named after the book. Which is what you all just agreed we are.”

  “Mumma gets things wrong,” Amy said. “Haven’t you figured that out yet? She gets a lot of things wrong. Like you, you’re one of her mistakes.”

  I asked, “What did she say when you asked her about our names?”

  “Why would we ask her?” they wondered.

  “The woman has no idea why she does most of what she does,” Amy said. “I’d have thought Bethy would have figured that out, if she’s supposed to be such a girl genius.”

  “Don’t call me Bethy!”

  “I wouldn’t go asking Mumma about our names,” Meg advised. “I know you’re thinking of it.”

  Jo told me why. “Mumma likes to think we don’t figure things out.”

  “And we like her to think she’s right,” Amy added. She always joined up with the other two, three against one. So of course I asked Mumma.

  Actually, I didn’t ask her so much as shriek it at her, in the midst of one of our heated quarrels. “You named me Beth because you want me to be the one to die!”

  “I don’t want anyone to die!” Mumma shrieked back at me. “What’s the matter with you!”

  “I should be Amy!” Then I was struck by a disquieting and yet exhilarating thought and I stopped shrieking. “You did get it wrong. You can be wrong, you’ll just never admit it.”

  “You can change your name legally if that’s what you want, when you’re eighteen,” Mumma answered.

  I reported this back to my sisters. “I can change my name, legally. When I turn eighteen, Mumma said.”